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A grizzled young captain and his ragtag crew go on the biggest and deadliest refueling trip in history. Stakes: entire galactic economy, massive inflation should they succeed. It starts out promising, introduces the main characters effectively, gets us to hate the bad guys properly, and outlines enough of the life in the early fourth millennium to give us a good stage of where we are now. And it ends well, too, with a great climactic finish, triumph attained with sacrifice, and lessons learned.

Should be great, right? Well, there has to be a middle point between the beginning and the end - and here there's a problem.

Here the story shifts away into an almost-half-book tangent about other matters, things that are largely irrelevant for the narrative, yet not sufficiently fleshed out in their own right to be worthwhile. It gives glimpses to the future society in the form of a few worlds visited, but each world is so superficially described and detailed - the visits so short and fairly uneventful - that there's not much to them on their own. The trips between largely consist of philosophical ramblings, especially from the aspiring author Katin who is still looking for a subject for his book (a common malady even in our time), creating a bit of a backdrop for this whole thing but giving it too much direct focus. There's an extended scene - fired up by Tarot reading of all things - that goes into greater detail of the modern technology and the few Luddite gypsies that have chosen to stay out of it, but it would have needed to give us more spotlight of them for it to be worth our while, as the bits about the computer plugs had already become clear elsewhere... and yet at the same time the whole thing with Tarot feels almost the opposite, and completely out of place with the rest of the story. And as for the history of the setting, the book talks a lot about things that happened in our time, many millennia before the present of the book, as if there was nothing worthwhile that had happened since: it feels lazy, to be honest, a massive missed opportunity in worldbuilding.

All these aspects feel transient, ephemeral, like tiny bubbles of potential interest floating in the void, separate from one another, doing nothing on their own, yet still taking up precious space and attention from the actually plot-relevant stuff. Very little of actual consequence to the story takes place in them.

It compares itself to the Arthurian legends, towards the end, but it really would have needed more epic space adventures to qualify as such. And it started out so well, too. A bit of a shame.